4/5/08

Is it football season yet? Hey, at least they're consistent. None of this "some wins and some losses" business like every other team in baseball.

Anyway, how did today go, aside from another debacle in Detroit? Pretty well, I have to say. There was nice light weekend traffic on the rest of the ride down to El Paso. When I got to the beer distibutor, the forklift guy was just finishing up with the only other truck there. He got started on my trailer pretty quickly and I was done a short time later.

I was a few miles away from our drop yard, so I headed over to park and see what the rest of the day had in store. When I got there, I checked and saw that I was #2 on the board. Not bad at all for a border town on a weekend. About ten minutes later I got my assignment. I was to take a loaded trailer from the yard and run it up to Gurnee, Illinois for Tuesday morning. Beauty. I hooked it up, grabbed the paperwork (16,000 pounds... nice!), and headed out.

The afternoon drive took me up US-54 to I-40 and across. I made it to Amarillo before my eleven hours were all used up. The odometer says 670 miles today, so that's a solid day of work. Trying to find a place to park in this town... we won't be doing that again in the foreseeable future. Pain in the ass. My week wraps up with 3,636 miles, plus $70 for the two extra stops on the Colorado run, meaning another solid paycheck is in store.

The more I hear how bad things are getting, the more my miles just keep ticking away. I actually think my company might be in a pretty good position regarding the soft economic cycle, considering that a good deal of our freight crosses the border. If we were strictly domestic, we'd probably feel a manufacturing slowdown a little more severely. That cheap labor in Mexico is probably not such a bad thing when you do what I do for a living. I really don't know though. Just thinking out loud.

Speaking of thinking out loud... Am I the only one who isn't surprised by job losses following a minimum wage increase? Isn't that what businessmen have warned us about since the beginning of time? I mean, I know that I had to cut the hours of my employees when the minimum wage went up in the 90's, simply as a matter of being responsible. Then, if someone quit, I just worked a little harder intead of hiring a replacement. Economic data seems to validate my experience. Why do certain folks who like to pontificate about "the economy" not seem to get this? I heard a sound bite from a prominent gal the other day. She was so flummoxed by some kid who said his mother's hours had been cut since the minimum wage went up. Duhhhrrrr...

And am I also the only one who is 100% convinced that extending unemployment benefits would worsen a slow economy? I've heard certain folks proposing longer and longer periods of unemployment benefits under the guise of "economic stimulus." That's not stimulus, you bunch of jagoffs. Stimulus is an effort to spur growth. To grow you need people to do shit and make money. Then they spend that money on the shit that other people are doing. That's how it works. Sitting on your ass and collecting tax money does nothing to spur growth. It prolongs whatever issues caused you to be unemployed in the first place. Why do certain folks who like to pontificate about "the economy" not seem to get this? Duhhhrrr...

But what do I know? I'm just a big dumb OTR truck driver. Getting political on my blog is usually a sign that it's bedtime. Cheers.